Month: August 2018

Foreign Policy, a left-leaning publication on international affairs, obtained and published the contents of an internal diplomatic cable from the U.S. embassy in South Africa back to the State Department in Washington, DC, which “rebukes” the president for his tweet last week about land reform and farm murders in South Africa.

[T]he U.S. Embassy in South Africa has tacitly rebuked the president in a cable sent clarifying the issue and correcting misperceptions put forward by the president …

The cable, sent Wednesday morning and obtained by Foreign Policy, does not mention the president or his tweet at all. Titled “Despite Crime Epidemic, Farm Murders Down,” the cable outlines statistics on murder rates on white-owned South African farms.

“Some journalists and lobby groups have simplified complex land disputes to serve their own ends,” the cable says.

Political officers from the U.S. Embassy reached out to a broad array of experts—including farmers, police, crime researchers, and academics—to gauge the extent of violence against white farmers. They found “no evidence that murders on farms specifically target white people or are politically motivated,” the cable states.

“Farmers suggested that they are more vulnerable to violence because of the remoteness of the farms and inadequate responses of law enforcement agencies, but they also noted that farm violence has never resulted in any kind of land seizure,” according to the cable.

Trump’s tweet appeared to respond to a State Department statement, aired on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News, which appeared to defend the South African government’s approach to land reform in optimistic terms.

Though the South African government rejected Trump’s tweet, and commentators in South Africa were generally critical of the president, some applauded his stance.

We are hearing a lot about how the current controversy in the Catholic Church is ideological in nature. As the media has it, "conservative Catholics" are attacking the pope while "progressive Catholics" defend him against the evil assault. This is ridiculous for many reasons, starting with the fact that the controversy is about sex abuse and cover-ups. It’s got nothing to do with ideology.

Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) has long admitted his past brushes with the law, but now it appears he may have failed to provide some important details about one of his arrests.

In 1995, O’Rourke, who is challenging GOP Sen. Ted Cruz for his Texas Senate seat, was arrested for forcible entry after he jumped a fence at the University of Texas at El Paso, he wrote in an op-ed for the Houston Chronicle earlier this week.

Three years later and just after his 26th birthday, O’Rourke admitted he was arrested for drunk driving, calling it a “far more serious mistake for which there is no excuse.”

But that’s as far as O’Rourke went into the details surrounding his “serious mistake.”

The Chronicle recently obtained a copy of the arrest report from the Texas Department of Public Safety that showed the then-26-year-old O’Rourke had caused an accident and attempted to flee from the scene.

What are the details?

At about 3 a.m., Sept. 27, 1998, a witness told police, according to the arrest report, that he saw a green Volvo driving at a “high rate of speed” in a 75-mph zone along Interstate 10 in Anthony, Texas. Anthony is a suburb of El Paso near the New Mexico border.

The witness told the officer that the Volvo, driven by O’Rourke, had passed him just before it “lost control and struck a truck traveling the same direction.” After hitting the truck, the Volvo careened across the center median before it came to a halt facing oncoming traffic.

O’Rourke then reportedly tried to leave the scene but he was stopped by the witness who turned on his overhead lights to try to stop him and warn the oncoming traffic, the report said.

The officer reported that O’Rourke had “glossy eyes and breath smelled of alcohol beverage.”

“I then asked the defendant to step out of the vehicle, upon doing so the defendant almost fell to the floor,” the officer wrote in his report.

He observed O’Rourke having “extreme difficulty maintaining his balance.”

O’Rourke failed a field sobriety test and a breathalizer, the report said. His blood alcohol level was recorded at 0.136 and 0.134. The legal limit at the time was 0.10.

He was arrested, charged with DWI and released after he posted bail.

The charges were later dismissed after he completed a court-approved diversion program, according to the Chronicle. There were no injuries, according to the police report.

(Image source: Texas Department of Public Safety)

What did O’Rourke say?

“I drove drunk and was arrested for a DWI in 1998,” O’Rourke told the Chronicle. “As I’ve publicly discussed over the last 20 years, I made a serious mistake for which there is no excuse.”

He did not address his alleged attempt to leave the scene, according to the Chronicle.

Since being in political office, the congressman has called his arrests youthful indiscretions.

“Those mistakes did not ultimately define me or stop me from what I wanted to do in my life or how I wanted to contribute to the success of my family and my community,” he said in the Chronicle op-ed Monday.

What did Cruz’s campaign say about the incident?

On Friday in an email to TheBlaze, Cruz spokeswoman Emily Miller declined to comment on the subject.

What else?

In O’Rourke’s op-ed, he wrote about his recent tour of the Harris County Jail and how he believes the criminal justice system should be reformed.

He wrote that he wants to eliminate private prison systems, stop the “failed war on drugs,” “stop using mandatory minimum sentencing for non-violent drug offenses,” and end the use of “bail bonds that punish people for being poor.’

Finally, he said he wants to “help cut down on recidivism for non-violent crimes.”

“That starts with strong rehabilitation services, counseling and access to preventative health care,” O’Rourke wrote. “It continues by banning the box on job applications so those formerly incarcerated can work and pay taxes, returning drivers licenses so they can get to that place of employment, allowing them to apply for loans that can unlock skills trainings, and ensuring their constitutional right to participate in civic life by voting is protected.”

‘[N]o such hearings were held with respect to the acknowledged FISA applications. Accordingly, no responsive hearing transcripts exist.’

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today announced that in response to a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, the Justice Department (DOJ) admitted in a court filing last night that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court held no hearings on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) spy warrant applications targeting Carter Page, a former Trump campaign part-time advisor who was the subject of four controversial FISA warrants.

In the filing the Justice Department finally revealed that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court held no hearings on the Page FISA spy warrants, first issued in 2016 and subsequently renewed three times:

[National Security Division] FOIA consulted [Office of Intelligence] … to identify and locate records responsive to [Judicial Watch’s] FOIA request…. [Office of Intelligence] determined … that there were no records, electronic or paper, responsive to [Judicial Watch’s] FOIA request with regard to Carter Page. [Office of Intelligence] further confirmed that the [Foreign Surveillance Court] considered the Page warrant applications based upon written submissions and did not hold any hearings.

President of Judicial Watch Tom Fitton had this to say about the new developments:

“It is disturbing that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance courts rubber-stamped the Carter Page spy warrants and held not one hearing on these extraordinary requests to spy on the Trump team. Perhaps the court can now hold hearings on how justice was corrupted by material omissions that Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the DNC, a conflicted Bruce Ohr, a compromised Christopher Steele, and anti-Trumper Peter Strzok were all behind the ‘intelligence’ used to persuade the courts to approve the FISA warrants that targeted the Trump team.”

As usual, Judicial Watch is doing the heavy lifting. You can support Tom Fitton and his team by clicking here.

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Needless to say, the discovery triggered a torrent of stories about the “controversial” nature of Martinez’s six-year-old post—because, apparently, disagreeing with a Hitlerian sentiment is now a provocative position. Some writers lazily created the impression that Martinez was quoting Hitler admiringly, while the usual suspects said the usual silly things.

As it turned out, Hitler hadn’t said the words in Martinez’s pro-gun meme, although the dictator indisputably embraced such a policy in both rhetoric and action. Perpetuating a questionable quotation can happen to the best of us. But what seems to really tick off people– and it’s difficult to judge how many average sports fans really care about Martinez’s politics (I suspect far fewer than the coverage suggests)—is the notion that an armed population can be a freer one.

“The rhetoric of invoking Hitler is indefensible because it trivializes what he and the Nazis did,” Mike Godwin of “Godwin’s Law” fame argued in a column at the Boston Herald. “It’s historically inaccurate to state that Hitler wanted to take people’s guns away. If anything, he wanted all citizens to have guns, except Jews.”

Avoiding Nazi analogies is, generally speaking, a very good idea. But there’s no evidence that Hitler wanted “all citizens” other than Jews to possess firearms. It’s true that the Nazis relaxed a few gun laws that had been forced on Germany after World War I, but by 1938 the Third Reich had banned all Jews, gypsies, and “enemies of the State” — which is to say, anyone the state deemed problematic — from possessing any weapons, including knives, firearms or ammunition. Even for Germans, gun laws remained relatively strict.

The gun-controllers seem more offended by the meme’s intimation that they, like autocrats, are interested in restricting the public’s right to own firearms. You may remember the feigned outrage over Ben Carson’s 2015 contention that through “a combination of removing guns and disseminating deceitful propaganda, the Nazis were able to carry out their evil intentions with relatively little resistance.” The folks at PolitFact rated his argument completely false, because factcheckers now believe they are gifted with the supernatural capability of judging the veracity of counterhistories.

Prominent members of the Democratic Party showed they have no problem with racists as they tried mainstreaming the racist and anti-Semitic preacher Louis Farrakhan at Aretha Franklin’s funeral, giving him a front-row seat.

Every time I hear a liberal call Donald Trump a fascist, I often want to ask them what the definition of a fascist is.

I would really go for anything in the ballpark of Merriam-Webster’s definition, “a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.”

Yes, that’s a bit much, but I wouldn’t even be asking them to hit the green on that definition. The fairway would suffice. Or just don’t get it into the bunker.

As it turns out, I’m probably asking the wrong question. I’m assuming these individuals had a reason why Donald Trump was a fascist and were integrating it into their definition of fascism.

Thanks to the inimitable Steven Crowder, I now know I was assuming way, way too much.

The CRTV host did one of his legendary “Change My Mind” segments regarding the president and accusations that he’s a fascist, and he did it right across from the White House.

The results were, um, well … let’s take a look:

That’s not even near the bunker, or the parking lot.

Do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?

So, let’s look at the three major accusations here:

#1) Racism

#2) Suppression of the media

#3) Um, you know, stuff.

So, as for number one, our participants say that he’s a bigot, with one of them saying that he’s even said the n-word (there’s no evidence for this, mind you). The basic gist seems to be that he feels like a racist to them, which isn’t the same thing as being a racist, but that doesn’t necessarily seem to matter here.

The second thing seems to be that he’s suppressing the media. Which is funny, considering the media can’t stop covering him or calling him a racist. (See point number one.) When Crowder points out that he goes after the “fake news media” as opposed to the media in general, the response is to not distinguish between the two.

All we have to say is that if he wants to engage in “forcible suppression of opposition,” he really ought to do a better job of it.

So then there’s point number three, which is, um, you know, Trump is like, I heard, stuff and yeah.

This, I admit, may be totally true — once we figure out what it actually is.

There you have it — why Donald Trump is a fascist. Severe social and economic regimentation? Hardly. Centralized autocratic government? That’s what he’s fighting against. Forcible suppression of opposition? These individuals were all speaking out on camera.

But then again, it’s not that they don’t even know what a fascist is. It’s that they don’t even know why Donald Trump is one.

Facebook has never been particularly conservative-friendly. However, as the late evening of Nov. 8, 2016 turned into the early morning of Nov. 9 and it became clear Newsweek wouldn’t be using that “Madame President” cover after all, things took a definite turn for the worse.

How bad has it gotten? Well, two heads of conservative publishers — including our own Floyd Brown — say they’ve lost 1.5 billion Facebook pageviews since Trump won.

And no, I didn’t accidentally hit the “b” instead of the “m.”

Those numbers come from The Gateway Pundit, who recently spoke to Brown and another top publisher in the right-wing opinion sphere.

“Floyd Brown is a conservative author, speaker and media commentator. In 2008 Floyd launched Western Journal which quickly became one of the top conservative websites in America,” they write.

“By 2016 Floyd’s organization of Western Journal and other conservative websites under his umbrella had more than a billion page views. Since 2016 Floyd’s organization lost 75% of its Facebook traffic.”

“Likewise, we spoke with Jared Vallorani from Klicked Media. Jared traveled to Washington DC with The Gateway Pundit and website owners at 100%FedUp in June to discuss Facebook targeting against conservative publishers with Republican lawmakers,” they report.

“Jared told The Gateway Pundit his organization Klicked Media, which hosts over 60 conservative websites, lost 400 million page views from Facebook in the last six months if you compare the traffic to a year ago.

“Jared said, ‘We lost 70% to 80% of our traffic if you compare January to May 2017 vs Jan to May 2018.’

Do you think Facebook wants to destroy conservative opinion?

“If you combine the total number of pageviews lost by just these two conservative online publishers you are looking at a loss of over 1.5 billion pageviews from Facebook in one year.”

And keep in mind, that’s just two publishers. That means pageviews are down way more than 1.5 billion on the conservative side of the coin.

The Gateway Pundit called this a “bloodbath.”

All we’ll say is that we tracked the situation using our own data and found that liberal outlets hadn’t faced the same sort of drops. That means that there was almost certainly a political element to this.

That might have been on the mind of President Trump when he said, a few weeks ago, that “too many voices are being destroyed” by social media and compared it to “Fake News.”

Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices. Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won’t let that happen. They are closing down the opinions of many people on the RIGHT, while at the same time doing nothing to others…….

…..Censorship is a very dangerous thing & absolutely impossible to police. If you are weeding out Fake News, there is nothing so Fake as CNN & MSNBC, & yet I do not ask that their sick behavior be removed. I get used to it and watch with a grain of salt, or don’t watch at all..

….Too many voices are being destroyed, some good & some bad, and that cannot be allowed to happen. Who is making the choices, because I can already tell you that too many mistakes are being made. Let everybody participate, good & bad, and we will all just have to figure it out!